The onboard ethernet port of my Asus M4A785TD-M EVO motherboard went bad. It was working fine, then all of a sudden quit. Neither Windows nor Linux can detect that the Ethernet chip is even present, e.g., not even with an lspci command on Linux. At first I thought that the BIOS settings had somehow changed and disabled it, but they hadn’t. I tried disabling it in the BIOS, rebooting, enabling it, and rebooting again. I tried resetting the BIOS settings to factory defaults. I tried clearing the CMOS.
This is the first ASUS motherboard failure I’ve ever had, out of several dozen ASUS motherboards I’ve used.
For a little while I got by with an old Belkin USB 10/100 Ethernet adapter I had lying around. The performance in Linux was not very good, but at least it worked. However, there are no Windows 7 drivers for it, and I occasionally do have to boot Windows 7. Today I installed an Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter, which is a PCIe NIC. It is working quite well. I haven’t yet tried out its Wake-on-LAN feature, but I was unhappy to lose that feature when the motherboard port failed, since the USB adapter doesn’t provide it.
I’ll probably replace the motherboard soon. I was happy with it until this happened, but now I’ve got an excuse to get a better one, such as the M4A89GTD PRO/USB3. I don’t actually need the onboard graphics, so in principle I could get the M4A89T PRO/USB3 instead, which is very similar but without the onboard graphics. However, it’s time to upgrade my server also, and I do want onboard graphics for that. I’ll get two of the with-graphics motherboards, and that way the motherboard in my desktop can serve as a backup if the one in the server fails.